On my knees

My dad’s battled lung cancer and won, at least for the past six weeks. He’s survived surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, and his lungs are strong and carry no signs of malignant cells. It makes me want to laugh, to sigh, to sob.

Lungs are two vineyards separated by a heart. Inside their lobes, hanging like clusters of grapes from the ends of delicately branching airways, are the lungs alveoli. Here is where the Earth’s gaseous layer and the inside of our body meet.

It is not a small space. (The combined surface area of all 300 million air-filled alveoli — the estimated average for a pair of healthy adult lungs — exceeds the total area of our skin by a factor of 25. That’s about the size of a tennis court.) But it is an intimate space. The diameter of a human hair is about 70 microns. The width of the alveolar membrane is … one micron. On one side of the micron, atmosphere. On the other, blood. The vanishing thinness of the alveolar boundary is what makes breathing our most ecological act.

Today I tasted the sour-sweet grapes growing on the fence and felt the cool, damp hands of the wind brush my face. A breeze lifted the trees’ branches and I heard the soft exhalation of the world’s breath. Maybe I will use the grapes to make a sourdough, which needs a wild yeast like that found on the dusty skins to get the spongy starter bubbling, or maybe I’ll give them to the crows, an offering for a life so full.